Well, here we are at the halfway mark, and I’m afraid I’ve begun to develop a headache. A quite nasty one, too.
Also, it looks like we haven’t pushed much further towards our goal today in donations. Come on, guys. We should AT LEAST be able to break the $90,000 mark this evening! If you’ve been following along with my blogathon but haven’t tried donated at least a wee bit to the SSA, I’m sad to inform you that this “no skateboarding” sign is very, very disappointed in you:
Okay!
Moving up into double digits!
I hope you all have been donating. You use the little button over there on the right, that also shows where we’re at in terms of getting to our goal. Remember today is the last day of SSA week, so it’s make it or break it time!
Also, I am still prepared to take requests. So you’ve donated, and there’s something you’d like to hear my thoughts on, don’t hesitate to let me know!
So long as we’re on the subject of words I totally, completely hate, like “junkie” and “prostituted women”, there’s one that never fails to totally creep me out: “panties”. [Read more…]
I was reading Runaways by Brian K. Vaughn the other day. I’m not much of a Marvel girl, but Runaways is particularly good. It’s young, it’s energetic, it’s fun, it’s clever, it’s funny, it deals with queer themes in an interesting way, it’s got a very original spin on the Team of Teen Superheroes concept, etc.
But there was a scene that really rubbed me the wrong way, and brought to mind something that I’d sort of been thinking about before but hadn’t yet really pulled all the way together. Hadn’t quite pissed me off in just the right way, I guess. [Read more…]
Sorry. My “eight” key is broken.
What’s particularly annoying about that is how many of my internet usernames involve the number “eighty-four” (my birth year).
So I just got back from grabbing some lunch, and it is easily the most dismal, shitty, dreary day, like, EVER. Great googly moogly.
Anyway… TRIGGER WARNING FOR AFTER THE JUMP [Read more…]
Oh look! A fancy banner thing!
I hope you’ve been donating, because I’m not bloody well doing this just for the sake of sore wrists, misery and exhausting a month’s worth of topics in a single weekend.
<3
Anyway, I hate to break the levity, but one thing that has been very significant to me this past week, and has triggered a lot of painful thinking on my part, albeit not in the ways you might expect, has been the recent emergence of accusations of rape directed towards trans activist Ira Dalton Gray. [Read more…]
I just got back from tracking down a pack of cigarettes, and I am totally, completely soaking wet.
It is a very, very rainy day here in Vancouver.
One thing I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately is sex workers’ rights and sex worker feminism. Given how both trans women and sex workers are often denigrated and attacked by precisely the same branches of feminism (the ones that often believe protecting women’s choices and autonomy takes a back seat to conforming one’s life to a particular political agenda, and that somehow a person themselves can be anti-feminist in nature, simply for attempting to survive… and that happily push the boot even harder against the necks of oppressed groups if those groups don’t fit into a particularly narrow vision of feminism. And that is barely even the tip of the iceberg in terms of the issues and motivations involved), it seems only natural for trans women and sex workers to cooperate. This is added to by how much overlap there is between our communities… the number of trans people who are sex workers or former sex workers, and the number of sex workers and former sex workers who are trans. [Read more…]
A little something worth knowing about…
Earlier this week, Cathy Brennan, the consistently irritating little embodiment of hate-mongering radical-feminism, outed a teenage trans kid to his high school in retaliation for what Brennan characterized as threatening remarks.
This is the e-mail she sent:
Good morning –
My name is Cathy Brennan, and I am a lesbian feminist activist in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. Recently, a student at your school, Rufus Ulrik (formerly Cara), has been emailing me and contacting me via social media. This student seems disturbed. I do not want any contact with this student., as she has made numerous disturbing comments about women and rape on Tumblr, a social media website. See [link removed] and [also removed]
Can you assist me please? I will be in the U.K. in July. You may also reach me at this email address. I am truly disturbed that someone this young would act this violently.
I am also reporting this user to Tumblr for abuse by copy of this email. They are user http://evenweirdosneedtoreblog.tumblr.com/
Thank you,
Cathy Brennan
There is absolutely no justification for. None. No “feminist” justifications, no “on his behalf” justifications, no “I felt threatened” justifications. Absolutely none.
This is shameless and monstrous. [Read more…]
So… I kinda really, really, really dislike the writing of J. Michael Stracyznski.
For those not familiar, he’s a TV show and comic book writer. For TV, he’s probably best known for his personal project Babylon 5, which broke TV tradition in being the first serial drama to have it’s total, complete story arc planned in advance. And actually successfully told the complete story before being prematurely canceled.
He also was one of the head writers on The Real Ghostbusters cartoon. Which, if you’re around the same age I am, you undoubtedly remember. It was the one with Egon, Peter, Ray, Winston, Janine and Slimer, even though they didn’t look anything like the actors who portrayed them in the movie (the cartoon was unable to acquire legal rights to those actors’ likenesses). Not the stupid other one with the gorilla.
His current project in comics is working on the Before Watchmen series. He’s doing the Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl mini-serieses, if I recall correctly. I won’t be reading them. I’m only following Darwyn Cooke’s Minutemen (because Hollis Mason is my favourite Watchmen character, and Cooke is a great writer) and Silk Spectre (because I love Amanda Connor’s art, and really enjoy comics with well-written female protagonists). I might take a look at Brian Azzarello’s Rorschach and Comedian, though. MAYBE.
But, for J. Mike (all J. Mikes are horrible), I never saw Babylon 5 (I liked Deep Space 9 better), and aside from Ghostbusters, my first encounter with him was reading his comic Rising Stars. [Read more…]
So… Isis King has an American Apparel ad.
Isis King, if you’re not aware, is a particularly beautiful (under normative standards) trans woman who appeared as a contestant on Next Top Model.
American Apparel, for Pride Month (which is June in most US Cities, though July up here in Vancouver), have done a series of new ads demonstrating a supposedly pro-LGBT message. “Supposedly” because I’m not sure much effort has gone into the latter two letters. Isis King was recruited as a model, and appeared in the following images:
